Nineteen Hours

It was ten past eleven at night when they let me into Room One, and the first thing I noticed was that someone had taken away the chain.

The steel ring was still set in the table. But the cuffs were gone, and Arlo Wren sat with both hands loose on the surface in front of him, in the same gray sweater, with the same gray blanket round his shoulders. It was Briona's doing. She had stood in the corridor for a long moment before she opened the door, and said, in her level voice, "I'd rather he were comfortable. It makes for a better statement. Nobody can say afterward that it was coerced." She had looked at me sidelong. "Also, I don't think he's going anywhere."

I did not think so either.

He had been in the building for nine hours. There had been fingerprints, and photographs, and a medical check by a bored doctor with a stethoscope, who had noted a slight elevation of the pulse and an old scar on the left forearm, and had signed a form. There had been a public defender, who arrived at six, a harassed young woman in a raincoat with a briefcase and a pained expression, and who had spent forty minutes alone with her client and left in what appeared to be tears. There had been the long business of the evidence, the transfer, the forms. Now, at last, it was quiet. The corridor had emptied. The light buzzed in its cage.

On the table in front of him, in a clear plastic bag with a strip of red tape across the seal, lay a small yellow clip.

"They let me keep it," said Arlo. "Till the morning. I asked very nicely."

"I'm glad."

"Sit down, Doctor. You look as if you'd been up for a week."

"Near enough."

I sat. The chair was as hard as I remembered.

…

"You asked for me," I said.

"Yes." He looked at his hands. "I'm sorry. It was a liberty. But there's a thing I wanted to say, and I thought you would be the right person."

"Go on."

"It's about the man who came to the hospital." He lifted his eyes. "The tall one. With the silver hair."

I said nothing.

"They had a television in the cell. A small one, high up, behind a grille. Someone had it on without the sound. And there was a clip—a few seconds—a man getting out of a car. A gray overcoat with a velvet collar. He stopped on the steps, and straightened his tie, and walked in." The ghost of a smile. "I knew him at once. I'd have known him anywhere."

"You had met."

"Once." His voice was quite light. "I was eleven. It was a fortnight after. There was an inquiry, of a sort, in a room at City Hall. I was taken, in a clean shirt, because I was the last child to have seen her. They put me on a chair in a corridor and told me to wait. A man came out of the room. He was in a good suit. He said, 'Hello, young man,' and he gave me a peppermint."

"Holt."

"He was a detective sergeant, then. Not so silver." Arlo turned his hand over on the table. "I looked at his hands. I always looked at hands. I think it was because I couldn't see people's faces well, in the dark, at the Home. And as he held out the peppermint, the forefinger of his right hand was going. Like this." He lifted his own finger from the steel and let it flutter, a very small fast tapping on the air. "I counted it. I had nothing else to count. Six in ten seconds."

I felt the skin go tight on the back of my neck.

"I've counted it since," said Arlo. "In the papers. On the news. At the civic dinners. Whenever he's been asked about the old cases. Every time he says the words 'heart condition,' there it is." His voice dropped. "It's his tell. I think he doesn't know. I think it's the only part of him that remembers."

"Six in ten seconds," I said.

His eyes went to my face. "You saw it."

"This afternoon. In a corridor at Jefferson. When Special Agent Lang told him that he was no longer in charge."

For a moment neither of us spoke. Then, quite suddenly, Arlo Wren laughed.

It was a short, breathless, delighted sound, the laugh of a boy who has found a thing in a drawer. "I knew it," he said. "I knew you would. Nobody else would have. I told the guard, 'He's the only one who looks.'" He pressed the back of his hand to his mouth. "Oh. Oh, that's good. That's such a good thing."

…

It was perhaps ten minutes later that I noticed his eyes.

We had been talking quietly. I will not set it all down; it was nothing, a handful of small things, a half-hour of two tired people with a good deal in common. He asked about Cambridge. He asked what I had done with the lecture I had been meant to give in September. I told him that I had sent my regrets. He said that was a pity, he would have liked to read it. He said it quite seriously. And I looked at him across the table, in the harsh white light, and saw that the whites of his eyes were yellow.

It was faint. It was the faintest tinge, at the margin of the cornea, like tea in a white cup. In any other light I should have missed it. In that light, from that angle, with his face tilted toward the lamp, it was as plain as print.

I said nothing.

I looked at his hands. The fine tremor I had noted at nine cycles was now closer to twelve. The fingernails had a bluish cast. I looked at his face, and saw a dewy pallor on the upper lip. I looked at the way he was sitting, upright, correct, with his shoulders drawn back and his chin level; and I saw that his right hand, which had lain open on the table for an hour, had moved. It had slipped down. It was resting now, quite casually, flat against his side, just beneath the lowest rib.

The right flank, I thought. The liver.

"Arlo," I said.

"Mm?"

"How long have you been in pain?"

He did not answer at once.

Then, with a small, slightly shamefaced smile, he took his hand away from his side and laid it on the table. "Since about nine," he said. "It's not much. It comes in waves. I didn't want to make a fuss."

…

He coughed.

It was a dry cough, a short one, such as one gives to clear the throat, and he turned his head away to do it. It came a second time, a little deeper. His breath hissed. When he turned back, the smile was still on his face, but the skin about the mouth had gone the color of old candle wax.

"I'm sorry," he said. "It's rather bad timing."

"What have you taken?"

I said it quietly. I had learned that, in my trade: that the worst thing you can do, at a moment like this, is raise your voice.

He looked at me. I saw him weigh it. I saw him consider, with that grave unhurried attention, whether he should lie; and I saw him decide, very gently, that he would not.

"Yesterday morning," said Arlo. "Four o'clock. Just before I switched on the stream. I wanted to be sure of the timing." His voice was thinner than it had been, and had a dry crackle at the bottom, like paper. "It's a slow one. About a day and a half to do its work. I calculated it so that I'd have time to finish. And not very much longer than that."

"What is it?"

"A compound. I made it. It doesn't matter."

"Arlo."

"There was never any plan to be taken alive," he said, with great mildness. "I hope you'll forgive that. When I put the clip in my hand and walked up the steps—it was a sort of understanding I had with myself. I'd done what I came to do. I thought: I'll go out quietly, and nobody will have to be bothered." He glanced at the clock. "It's ten to four, now. So I'd say I'm about—"

"It is a quarter past eleven."

"Is it?" He looked at the clock, and blinked, and I saw a flicker of true surprise pass across his face. "Oh. So it is. I'd lost track."

I turned my head and looked at the clock too.

It was twenty past eleven. I had been in that room for ten minutes. Which meant that we were nineteen hours and twenty minutes from four o'clock on the morning before.

I do not know what I felt. I know that I could not feel my hands.

…

It's slow, he had said. A day and a half.

Long enough to finish.

I sat there, in the hard chair, in the light that never went out, and the thoughts went through my mind like cards through a dealer's fingers.

I could call for help. I could do it now, in the next ten seconds, with a shout. Within three minutes there would be a doctor in the room, and within twenty an ambulance, and within the hour a bed in a ward with a monitor and a drip. The boy would be admitted. He would be treated, symptomatically, by men who did not know what he had taken. They would give him fluids. They would support the liver. They would stand about the bed, saying, if only we knew the compound.

And the compound was in the Bureau's evidence room, in a glass tube I had asked a young man to photograph.

Or I could stay.

He was talking. That was what I could not get away from. For nine hours he had been silent. He had not spoken to the guards, or the doctor, or the public defender, who had left in tears. He had waited, in a cell with a grille, for a man who would look at his hands. And now he was in a lit room, with no chain and no lawyer, and he was ready. He had said so. He wanted to talk. He wanted to tell the whole of it, from the beginning: the names, the dates, the bribes, the money, every man and woman who had taken a part. Held in his head, he had told me, was the whole chain of the thing. The documents told the story. He could tell the why.

If I called the ambulance, the statement would stop. They would take him away. The Bureau would wait; it would be tomorrow, or the day after. A man in a hospital bed is not a witness. He is a patient. He can be sedated. He can be shut up behind a door by a lawyer, or by a hospital, or by Frank Holt.

And if he died—

I looked at the clock.

He had perhaps thirty hours to live, if no one could name the compound. Or perhaps fewer. I did not know. I did not know anything. I knew only that I was a man in a chair, with the power to do one of two things, and a boy across the table who had folded his hands in front of him and was looking at me with an expression of such patient, gentle trust that I thought I would be sick.

"Atticus," said Arlo Wren.

"Yes."

"Is something the matter?"

WHAT DO YOU DO?

Arlo Wren is dying slowly, and you are the only person in the room who knows it. He has asked to give the full account, naming the men behind the cover-up, while his mind is clear. But every hour you spend listening is an hour his body spends losing. The vial that could tell the doctors what he took is already photographed and waiting, but the answer is not yet in hand.